The document describes Skillset, a tool for matching people to jobs based on their skills. It aims to develop a job skills inventory that allows employees to self-report their skill levels, which can then be verified by managers. Task leads can post job profiles listing required skills, and employees and task leads can search for matches. The goal is to more easily connect people to project work based on their education and skills. Adoption, content quality, integration with business practices, and transition to other organizations will influence the success of Skillset.

1. Skillset
A tool for finding people to do a job
Jeff Colombe, Ph.D.
Emerging Technologies Department
Presentation to Open Badges Alliance
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
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2. Strategy: Develop a job skills inventory and use it to match people to job roles
Open Badges has largely emphasized education and skill development.
Skillset is focused on the downstream concerns of employment, primarily finding people
for project work based on their education and skills.
This information can be useful in other ways. Corporate management can do gap
analysis and planning for workforce development and hiring on the basis of specific
skills. Education and professional development resources can be identified on a skill
basis and justified on a demonstrated need basis.
‘Matrixed’ employment: the wave of the future? Cross-organization, hourly billing to
charge numbers, management of conflicts of interest, who pays benefits…complicated
space with potentially high payoff beyond single-boss hierarchical model of
employment.
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3. Strategy: Develop a job skills inventory and use it to match people to job roles
Finding good people to work on a project is unnecessarily difficult, due to impoverished
and faulty communication channels (modesty, desire to promote self or others, word
of mouth, limited searchable data).
We are developing a digital job skills inventory relevant to MITRE that can be used to
match the right people to the right work. Some of this content will come from
professionally curated sources (e.g., ACM), and some will be crowd-sourced by the
user community.
Employees can fill out a profile in which they self-report their levels of skill in a wide
variety of domains. Broad categories include practical skills, subject matter expertise,
organizational/interpersonal skills, and preferred working styles.
An employee's self-reports of skill levels can be voluntarily verified by managers, task
leads, and others. Credentials are used to distinguish the type of authority in
verification.
Task leads can post profiles of the skills needed for a job role, and both employees and
task leads can search and rank from jobs to people and vice versa.
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4. Strategy: Develop a job skills inventory and use it to match people to job roles
Factors involved in the success of this effort include:
1. Adoption. We will investigate the problem of adoption by the user
community. Factors include effective user interfaces and effectiveness of search, and
psychological incentives such as desire for professional success and advancement. Social
bootstrapping will likely be a factor.
2. Quality of content. We would like for the user community to contribute to the skill
inventory, and for the community to 'cleanse' and select the best of these contributions
through usage and ratings.
3. Incorporation of Skillset into business practices. HR and legal issues, and corporate
culture are factors (*see next slide, for example).
4. Transition of Skillset to government organizations and the commercial
space. Exploring export of Skillset concepts, data, methods, practices, and software to
government organizations, as a plug-in module for enterprise HR software, and as a Web
service for talent management in the global economy.
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5. Strategy: Develop a job skills inventory and use it to match people to job roles
Skillset is NOT for:
Employee performance review
Laddering
Promotion
Raises
These purposes require
confidentiality
Skillset is for:
Finding work you want
Finding the help you need
Support for professional
development
Improved planning and gap analysis
for management
These purposes require sharing
some information
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6. Skillset concept: Use a crowd-sourced skill inventory to match people to work
Job role profiles Employee profiles
Comparison and ranking
Skill inventory
Finding desirable work Finding desirable workers
User-contributed content
and quality control
Project
lead
Curated content and administration
Interactive visualization of skill distribution
in organizations for gap analysis and
workforce development planning
Topic-mapped links to professional
development resources (education,
training, testing, accreditation, etc.)
User-contributed content
and quality control
Third-party
verifications
Employee
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7. Skillset concept: Use a crowd-sourced skill inventory to match people to work
Employee profiles
Comparison and ranking
Skill inventory
Finding desirable workers Finding desirable work
User-contributed content
and quality control
Project
lead
Curated content and administration
Interactive visualization of skill distribution
in organizations for gap analysis and
workforce development planning
Topic-mapped links to professional
development resources (education,
training, testing, accreditation, etc.)
User-contributed content
and quality control
Third-party
verifications
Employee
Verifications for Collaborative interaction
Sam Roudebush
10/11/2013
Nicole Shaffer
10/11/2013
Mike Phelan
10/11/2013
Jared Alexander
10/11/2013
Job role profiles
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12. User suggestion: Reorganize these views to see several people at once,
with line-by-line comparisons of job role profile skills and employee skills
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Since job role profile skills are probably few in number, make skills the
columns and profiles the rows?
Alternate strategy: Use arrows to rapidly flip among ranked employees

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Mockup of desired function:
open skill tree to location of topic
to view in context

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17. Request verifications

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19. Recommendations from user engagement (1 of 2)
- Show a score (visually and numerically) for ranked hits
- If I see a skill in someone else’s profile that I want to add to my own, allow me to click
on it and self-report
- Preserve my personal state of the skill tree when navigating in and out of it
- Allow rapid comparison between employees and job roles, preserving line-by-line skill
comparisons
- Upward aggregation of self-reported skills in profiles is essential for matching
(granularity issue)
- Idea that project leads will be the key adopters (the market depends on
opportunities), make it easy for them to adopt
- Handle cross-listed topics (some appear more than once…unify?)
- Users might sign up for automatic notifications of job roles or professional
development opportunities (e.g., MITRE Institute) based on advertised levels of skill
and interest
- Automatic verifications from MITRE Institute course completion and other
professional development achievements?
- Who viewed my profile?
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20. Recommendations from user engagement (2 of 2)
- Create MITRE Institute or other professional development opportunities based on
advertised levels of skill, interest, and needs defined in job role profiles?
- “Job Fair” partnership with colleges, etc., using Skillset to identify skills and interests
of candidate interns?
- Automatically populate review / ”End-of-year” conversations with Skillset content?
- Possibility of “private” verifications for use in such conversations
- On skill topic pages, show links to cross-referenced or clustered similar skills that
might be of interest, as an aid in navigation to useful topics
- Show employee availability (from enterprise HR software), distinct from “interest”
- Filter returns by professional level or job title (proxy for cost)
- Verifications could create awkward social situations (why didn’t they verify me? …or if
I can see who else they verified, again, why didn’t they verify me?)
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backup slides

22. GUI mockup: Request or offer skill verifications
Request verification
Volunteer or update a verification
Request verification for skill:
"Cross-platform whiteboarding"
Type names of people:
Message (click to edit):
Jeff Colombe has requested that you supply a verification
for one or more self-reported skill levels.
Please visit the link here to browse these requests.
A single notification e-mail with all your requests to each
individual will be sent automatically.
Done
When an employee is browsing their own profile:
When an employee is browsing another's profile:
Volunteer verification for skill:
"Cross-platform whiteboarding"
Employee self-report
S I have been or am now their project lead
Expert
I am this employee's (check single most relevant, or none):
S Direct supervisor (S former)
S Assistant department head (S former)
S Department head (S former)
S Technical director (S former)
S Corporate management (S former)
If no above boxes are checked, you will be a "peer"
Verify
Browse popup with prefiltered project numbers
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23. What is verification?
Verification is a voluntary public act of agreeing with what an employee has voluntarily
said about themselves.
It is emphatically NOT a rating, endorsement, validation, or evaluation. It does not carry
value judgment, only 'truthiness'. I cannot publicly indicate that I think your self-reported
skill level should be changed to something else…but we could have a private
conversation about it if you want me to verify you.
Verifications may stay in the system until the person who gave them decides to delete
them, or until the recipient deletes them.
They may stay in the system even after an employee has changed job roles in the
company (e.g., no longer my DH), or even if they leave the company.
If I have changed my self-rating, an outdated verification will stick around but its text will
be greyed out. No longer 'fresh produce'.
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24. What is verification?
Verification is not considered necessary for an employee's self-reported skill level to be
valid or truthful.
It is merely meant to be helpful in informing strangers about what you are good at.
Social engineering: don't let people get too worked up about whether they do or don't
have verifications.
Rare skills may be difficult to verify by those who don't have them.
Also, people in line to verify you regularly have to judge the capabilities of others that
they themselves do not possess. This is why in-person discussions are critical!
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